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The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation
Knopf
November 2006
On Sale: October 31, 2006
528 pages
ISBN: 0679403817
EAN: 9780679403814
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
This is the story of how America awakened to its race
problem, of how a nation that longed for unity after World
War II came instead to see, hear, and learn about the
shocking indignities and injustices of racial segregation in
the South—and the brutality used to enforce it. It is the story of how the nation’s press, after decades of
ignoring the problem, came to recognize the importance of
the civil rights struggle and turn it into the most
significant domestic news event of the twentieth century. Drawing on private correspondence, notes from secret
meetings, unpublished articles, and interviews, veteran
journalists Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff go behind the
headlines and datelines to show how a dedicated cadre of
newsmen—first black reporters, then liberal southern
editors, then reporters and photographers from the national
press and the broadcast media—revealed to a nation its most
shameful shortcomings and propelled its citizens to act. We watch the black press move bravely into the front row of
the confrontation, only to be attacked and kept away from
the action. Following the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision
striking down school segregation and the South’s
mobilization against it, we see a growing number of white
reporters venture South to cover the Emmett Till murder
trial, the Montgomery bus boycott, and the integration of
the University of Alabama. We witness some southern editors joining the call for
massive resistance and working with segregationist
organizations to thwart compliance. But we also see a
handful of other southern editors write forcefully and
daringly for obedience to federal mandates, signaling to the
nation that moderate forces were prepared to push the region
into the mainstream. The pace quickens in Little Rock, where reporters test the
boundaries of journalistic integrity, then gain momentum as
they cover shuttered schools in Virginia, sit-ins in North
Carolina, mob-led riots in Mississippi, Freedom Ride buses
being set afire, fire hoses and dogs in Birmingham, and
long, tense marches through the rural South. For many journalists, the conditions they found, the fear
they felt, and the violence they saw were transforming.
Their growing disgust matched the mounting countrywide
outrage as The New York Times, Newsweek, NBC News, and other
major news organizations, many of them headed by
southerners, turned a regional story into a national drama. Meticulously researched and vividly rendered, The Race Beat
is an unprecedented account of one of the most volatile
periods in our nation’s history, as told by those who
covered it.
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